Responses of the Visegrad 4 Countries to the Current European Migrant Crisis

Responses of the Visegrad 4 Countries to the Current European Migrant Crisis

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The Refugee Crisis and the Reaction of the Visegrad Countries.

The Refugee Crisis and the Reaction of the Visegrad Countries. Budapest, 30 May 2016, Workshop. Organised by the Hungarian Europe Society and supported by the CEU Center for European Neighborhood Studies and the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung für die Freiheit.

To supplement the thematic analytical work of our current research project the expert group of the HES in consultation with our partners compiled a comprehensive basic questionnaire in order to map out and indentify basic similarities and differences among Visegrad 4 countries in terms of their responses given to the current European migration crisis. The main fields we intended to cover included among others the decisive aspects of the relevant domestic political landscapes and the related historical background, the Visegrad Cooperation, the emerging civic engagement and of course the basic characteristics of the migrants arriving and passing through the V4 countries. 

As to the resources of the sought information, our main idea was to invite experts familiar with the issue suggested by our partners from the V4 countries to reply our questionnaire. Besides professionals of academic circles we wanted to rely also on the opinion of the well informed practitioners dealing with this issue from the administration, the media, civil society, etc. For this reason our questionnaire consists of two parts, the first part with general questions on the current political context framing the migration issue while the second part covers the more technical, legal and historical aspects. We have invited some 200 selected people to fill out our questionnaire, of whom 72 complied with 41 % of them completing both parts of the questionnaire. The composition of the respondents’ nationality looks quite balanced; 29 % of them being Polish, also 29 % Hungarian, 25 % Czech while 16 % of the respondents were Slovaks. Despite of the relatively high proportion of the answers we naturally do not consider our findings representative in any of the possible aspects due to the qualitative nature of our approach. At the same time however we are convinced that our method can provide a useful orientation point for the further elaboration of our common research project.

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